eleventh.transmission
arts, culture, media, activism
All work copyright
the respective
owner. Nothing
may be reproduced
without consent.
FICTION
CubaLibre
by George Sparling
Walker committed a terrible crime, worse than murder. At least Cain founded cities, even though he killed brother
Abel. Something great came from the seed of Cain: his progeny. Walker's crime deserved capital punishment,
though castration might've appeased the masses. At least that would be for the public good.
Seated on a toilet in a stall, Walked shat out a couple Big Macs and a pound of greasy fries. A comfortable, peaceful
shit always produced calmness, as on a beach inhaling negative ions brought relaxation. But a camcorder, held over
the partition in the hands of a strange man, broke tranquility's spell.
Walker regarded himself progressive, libertarian even. But when the interloper pleasured himself, re-playing
Walker's images of pale thighs and bald head, in the adjacent stall, Walker realized everything changed after those
airliners crashed into America's pride and power. Before Walker buckled up and left, the voyeur moaned, finishing off
the job.
Driving back to work, he thought the man might upload the video to the internet. His former wife and three grown
children might recognize him, but he'd done nothing wrong except use a stall next to a pervert.
He became media as everyone else in the world had. In fact, if Walker searched the net, he might click the viral,
enjoying whacking off as the stranger had. Double-Onanistic: watching himself half naked in the vid, masturbating,
then the audio, the stranger's ahhing and ohhing co-mingling with his, getting off.
As sexual fantasies or fetishes went, not bad. But the connection between Walker's past and the vid: so condemning,
that spymaster peering above him, a judge-pentitant, pronouncing Walker guilty.
Home, he drank Cutty Sark, the internet streaming females singing Celtic music, ethereal and melancholic, erasing
the day. Their songs, like wiping clean with zeroes the hard drive, lulled him into Paranoia-Avoidance. PA's very
existence meant genuine paranoia followed. But paranoia was irrational. It wasn't paranoid when objective reality
smacked him in the face, knocking him around.
After showering the next morning, the phone rang. It was his daughter, a freshman in college.
"No, Lucinda, I never use public bathrooms."
"It sure looked like you," she said. "Your bald patch is one of a kind."
“Gotta go, sweetie. Bye." He called in sick, drinking scotch, watching daytime TV, hoping the glare lobotomized him,
destroying memories and obliterating deeds. If a practicing Christian, now would be the time for prayer and
deliverance.
He'd scheduled an appointment with a doctor the next day after work.Galloping hypocondria outpaced his reason,
frantically worrying about skin cancer.
Sitting in the waiting room, reading People magazine ( nothing but teasing celebrity photos these days ), he
observed a fiftyish woman seated across from him. The last patient left the office. When he looked at her, she pulled
out a mobile from her handbag, and punched ten digits. She threw him a cold, pitying glance, then raised her skirt,
showing Walker her pantyhose from the waist down. His wife sometimes titillated Walker like that in a business suit.
Just then, a sheriff's SUV pulled up outside. The woman pushed her skirt down, flounced past him, leaving in the
vehicle.
If he were under observation, it seemed odd the last two incidents made Walker the object of desire. If the camcorder
guy and woman were, in fact, undercover operatives, their lusts overwhelmed their professional duties.
Walker had carried his urge to watch others for a lifetime. At twelve, he overheard a couple making love in their
bedroom. Walker lived in a suburban neighborhood, the houses close together. He told his parents what he'd
heard. His parents registered joy, their erotic neighbors thrilled them. Of course, sex was always taboo, but they
never told him to shut up and go to his room. He saw the their smirks as he told them verbatim the love-makers’
words. Rather than censor, they rewarded Walker, letting him stay up late to watch TV.
From that moment, Walker never left the voyeur superhighway. Marriage, sexual roleplaying with his wife, children---
these never squelched his drive for visual hedonism.
He'd freeze-frame nude scenes with well-known actresses, slavering as he pumped violently until discharge ( "It's
showtime---All That Jazz ), plumes and droplets wetting the carpet. His wife watched as he wanked, but she later
realized it was a one-man production. She'd go to another room in the house, chatting on the phone or conversing
with their children. She accepted Walker's insular being, his lost world..If not a hundred years of solitude, a few
decades at least.
Once, the car's igntion failed, and he took it for repair. His wife had the other car, Lucinda had hers at college. He
rode the bus to work. A woman seated nearby, with a dangling, plastic nametag, spoke into a mobile. She told her
contact where the bus headed, between which stops, the time, mentioning the "observed suspect," describing
Walker's clothes, as well as evaluating his emotional state.
Soon, she dirty-talked, detailing how her husband screwed their pit bull terrier, how she took photos of this on her
mobile. It mortified to know her husband was queer.
"I'll get even with Robert," she said. "Wait til the world sees the photos I upload to the net."
While surfing the internet, these days for semi-clothed female celebs, thinking them safe in the event his computer
was tracked, he clicked, "Bonnie Raitt," the blues singer. Certainly no one had ever searched her for seductive
poses. When her website downloaded, the phone rang.
He clicked to desktop, and picked up. A man asked whether Walker wanted a subscription to the local newspaper.
"No, not really," Walker said. "Not when I get it online."
"I see," said the sales solicitor, "How about another offer?'
"What's that?" Walker had shut down the computer by this time. Being discovered in the act, the boring adolescent
nightmare, still prevailed.
"What about something literary, then." Literary? Had the solicitor meant a local book review, perhaps?
"Go ahead," Walker said. Sounded unique, anyway.
The man began reading passages from Michel Houellebecq, Darcey Steinke, J.G. Ballad's Crash, and Kathy Acker's
post-modern explicit descriptions of desire, of pain and its aftermath, sex. Walker wanted to tell the stranger to fuck
off, but listened instead. The guy breathed heavier, low hush-moaning beneath every phrase. Walker heard flesh
slapping, phone soliciting a subterfuge for verbalizing charged literary passages, an excuse for wanking.
Walker knew the man wanted him to do likewise, getting aroused, joining in. But Walker knew provocation when he
heard it, understood the strange voyeur wanted him to get nasty, breaking FCC laws against obscenity, getting
nabbed for the crimes.
Walker had been hospitalized after he broke up with his wife. The crack-up meant a week in the local mental
hospital, then months with a shrink, the inevitable pharmaceutical drugs until Walker couldn't tolerate them anymore.
He couldn't anymore handle good wines and Cutty Sark,
which he valued above atypical anti-psychotics psyschiatrists liked to peddle.
He "cured" himself," much as animals endured and overcame their wounds. Those phone tappers expected him to
get paranoid, breaking every window in his home, burning the furniture, running outside naked, a revolver in hand,
shouting, "THE MESSIAH IS HERE! TELL THE WORLD!" And then the special tactical unit would arrive, blasting him
with a hundred rounds, saving the neighborhood. Scapegoating undesirables, the classic response by those
needing an enemy within to loath and fear. Walker clicked off, the guy about to explode.
Donna, his ex-wife, phoned him at work.
"What's the occasion?" he asked.
"Lucinda saw you on YouTube." Was his daughter a perv, too?
"She's wrong, damn wrong." He couldn't hold back defensive anger.
"It's the male pattern baldness," Donna said. "She saw the top of your head."
"Must've been my doppelganger. Why would anyone watch a bald guy's head?"
"Maybe in public washrooms." Donna never sounded so snide. "A guy jerked. She heard it clearly."
"Why'd anyone want to do that?" Undercovers turned voyeurs would. Damn it, Donna.
"Maybe you're under suspicion. Maybe someone wants to blackmail you."
"I haven't been contacted," Walker said. "What else is new?" He hadn't spoken to her since the separation.
"Lots of labile people in surveillance ops, at least that's what Arnie says."
"Labile sounds like shrink talk"
"Arnie's a clinical psycholgist," she said.
"Graduating from MIT, running a geotechical engineer business wasn't good enough?"
"Too much buried inside. I never knew you until I left for good."
"Who am I?" Walker hadn't asked this question to anyone.
"I thought I knew until you disappeared into the computer," she said.
"Earned lots of money on the internet."
"That internet was your real wife."
"What's that mean?" Walker hadn't a clue.
"Lucinda ran through your files once. Sorry I never told you."
"Damn, I should've used a password."
"She'd hack into yours anyway."
"So many hardnoses in your family. It must be genetic."
"A brother in a private security firm, that's all."
"What's he up to these days?"
"Very busy. Reads a lot, especially fiction."
"Michel Houellebecq, maybe? Ever hear of him?"
"I read a review of an early novel," she said. "Can't recall discussing it with him."
"The review or the novel?"
"Why so accusatory? Call him up and ask."
"He records all calls, doesn't he?" Walker assumed then their call was monitored.
"Probably. Just called about YouTube," she said. "The tag's "Bald" if you're interested."
"Rather watch Charlie Rose. Have to work now. Bye." He hated it whenever she watched Rose's interviews. She had
a fatal attraction to CEOs.
That night Walker clicked "KoochieOldCal" and had a very good one for the first time in weeks.
The next bright afternoon, Saturday, Walker opened the door after a soft knocking. He thought it was a strong gale,
but a middle-aged woman appeared, along with a male friend. Strange, the younger man, holding a cell phone to his
mouth while the slightly northern European-accented woman seemed making a veiled proposition to Walker. But
she never explicitly came out and said so, no quid pro quo. Maybe she hadn't wanted to violate the law.
At first, she excited Walker. A fourtyish, slender, youthful voice and tight body; this appealed to him. But paranoia
throttled potential linkage with her. So soon after Donna called? Very suspicious.
"You have to leave," Walker said.
"I just want you to listen a moment, please," she said. Her face looked pained. Had he hurt her as her first boyfriend
might've in Stockholm or Copenhagen?
"Leave. Now," Walker said. The guy whispered into the cell.
"Not so soon, if you'd allow just a minute. Please." She aroused Walker; the billowly, full-length skirt, her pliancy and
pleading. Here stood a woman capable of understanding him, having patience with all Walker's bad habits. Maybe
even his whining.
"I'll call the police. Go. Now." Walker pointed his hand toward the end of the block. "Get out of my sight. Now."
She walked away, head bent reverentially as peasants in Millet's Angelus painting. Cell-phone man re-dialed. Walker
saw his lips moving rapidly as he left the front steps.
Walker had to get another life. He saw the brick wall at the back of the stage. Frank Zappa was right: after negotiable
and unprofitable freedoms vanished, only the brick wall remained.
Fast-forward: CubaLibre, 2019. Walker strolled The Malecon in Havana. Castro died thirteen years ago, communist
repression and dictatorship now gone. Capitalism replaced communism, like pushing F-10, System Restoration, on
Walker's old computer. No more old-style, 20th-century revolutions.
A new, properous middle class created CubaLibre. Walker paid $500 and entered a dark room. He sat on soft foam,
adjustable to any position. A 10' by 15' screen lit the darkness. He pushed some buttons on the console's limitless
sexual selections. Nostalgia, its desire, rushed through his seven chakras. Computer-generated images unleashed
his carnal fantasies. Nothing so lifelike back in 2006.
In one fetish, as the cast scrolled down, he read three distant relations of former dictator Batista. One of Walker's all-
time horniest vignettes played. He hadn't sprung it loose in years. CubaLibre: free elections, democracy, religion, law
and order, clean streets, rights of ownership, international shops up and down The Malecon.
Watching scenes prohibited in 2006, even corpses were allowed as onscreen partners there on The Malecon. He
ceased after nine thick shots. He showered, and ate a sumptuous buffet. He paid another $500 and chose more.
Too dangerous in 2006, but in CubaLibre, all was permitted.
Becoming a citizen proved simple. He had to pay $500 daily, watching in darkness all his buried urges.
Walking back to his hotel, he saw forced-marched prisoners trudging down The Malecon.
CubaLibre.
THE END
Biography
I've been published in many literary magazines including Word Riot, nthposition, Pindeldlyboz, Istanbul Literary
Review, Underground Voices, and Pittsburgh Quarterly. I've fiction upcoming in Underground Voices and Thieves
Jargon. I'm retired. I'm working on a novel about life in New York City during the early 1970s.